Single Greatest Tip For Success Online (Updated!)

by Patrick Toerner on April 5, 2010

What is your single greatest tip for succeeding online? This was the question that I asked some bloggers and internet entrepreneurs that I admire. The replies I received amazed me. Some short, sweet, and simple and others long, precise, and insightful.

This was an eye-opening experience. You can tell that each person was extremely limited when I asked for only their single greatest tip. I feel that each person could easily elaborate and turn their answer into 3,000 words or more. I won’t hold you back any longer, here they are, in no special order:

My single greatest tip for succeeding online is to focus on consistent action towards one goal, for a set period of time. Don’t do it forever, but give yourself at least a good six months to a year of solid work on a project and see what happens. Consistence and Persistence are the keys to success online, no matter what you are doing, so get to work and don’t stop!

Success online is just like success in life… it is about being 100% authentic, 100% real, 100% you. I feel that people, in general, are tuned in on the bullshit meter and will disregard anyone who inauthentic. To really hit it out of the park online, become vocal about what you believe in – and be 100% real. It truly is the formula for success, from my experience.

Persistence. Take time to really research your niche. Spend at least a week or so, getting to know the positives and the negatives to what you’re about to do. I recommend this because you’re going to spend at least a few YEARS in this topic. Success doesn’t happen overnight. Especially with starting an online business. It comes from a snowball effect of repeated effort. You’ll find that if you continue to work at it, you can’t help but be successful.

For instance, let’s say you start with affiliate marketing. You can spend at least a number of months honing your craft and learning what people really respond to. After doing this for a while, you’ll discover that there are a number of “information gaps” which most people are missing. It’s through these information gaps that you can create your own product. Then you can go from affiliate marketer to information product owner.

Honestly, the best piece of advice I ever heard was the idea of staying with your niche for many years. It’s what kept me going when the times were tough and money wasn’t coming in. Currently, I’m in a brand new niche. But I KNOW I’ll succeed because I’m prepared to go in for the long haul.

Succeeding on anything depends on reaching your goals, if you want to achieve success in your online business then by logic you must have a goal, then think of the time you need, time is the most dangerous challenge, the best way to deal with time is to set a long-term plan, focus on your target, start step by step and never rush or give up, don’t forget your audience, when you talk say the truth, its ok to do a few mistakes, people love it when you talk about your mistakes, they will love you more if you told them what you have learned from those mistakes, put in your mind that not all people will succeed, but you can make it.

Provide HUGE value, do that and people will come from around the world to see what you have to offer. You would think this would be common sense but it isn’t, hardly anyone does it and if you just take what you’re offering one step further than anyone else, this should be enough to make you stand out from the crowd and get the traffic and sales you need.

I’d say my greatest tip is to be patient. As cliché as that sounds, it’s true. I blogged for over a year without seeing a single penny. I stayed committed, and now things are paying off for me because of that. It’s never easy to do this type of work (if you would even call it work) for so long without seeing any form of payment, while keeping up with the other things in your life. But if you’re serious about what you are doing on your blog, you will have that patience and commitment to reach that success you want so much.

Decide on your niche and your way of making money and don’t stop until you actually make something happen. Until you start to see the type of results you’re looking for. You may have picked a poor niche or a bad angle, but there are still ways to make money from that. You’re going to learn so much more from the mistakes on one mission than continually trying lots of different things for a short period of time.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to any blogger is this: Don’t be afraid to invest in your success. For years I insisted on getting everything for free: free themes, free logo (was horrible), free information, free education. If you are serious about making a business online, buy a premium them, pay for a professional logo, buy products that will teach you how to succeed. You wouldn’t try to start a brick and mortar business without investing in it would you?

Quite simply put the bloody hours in! No one will do this for you and
there is no magic pill for any of this, you have to go and get it and don’t
let anyone get in your way. Write and promote, write and promote

Of course, it’s hard to narrow down one single great tip. But if I had to pick, I would say the best tip has to be Nike’s slogan “just do it!”

The reason why is a lot of people are handed great knowledge and information but a lot of people simply don’t take action for whatever reason. I mean, if you “really” want to be successful online (whatever that means in your eyes) you have to do the work. And that could mean researching, reading, learning, etc but you also have to put that knowledge to good use and actually take action to move forward.

In you’re trying to be successful online, it’s not just going to fall into your hands like a miracle. I mean, even if you win the lottery you have to take action to buy the ticket, right?

My greatest tip would be to have patience. As long as you are patient and continue to strive to achieve your goals, you will. Everything takes time online, especially blogging… If you are patient you will succeed.

First of all I feel that succeeding online is much the same as in the real world, just online. You need to show yourself and actually care about helping other people. Get yourself all around so you can meet people and become known for something. There’s not one word to really describe this though. Mainly, get out there and become known to people and show that you care and work your ass off.

First off, decide if you are a marketer or blogger as there is a pretty big difference. Bloggers write and make friends whereas marketers build sites for profit. It is possible to find a happy balance here, but rare. Bloggers gain social traffic that oftentimes is info-addicted and looking to interact, whereas marketers target buying traffic (usually from search engines) entering their sites for one reason: to make a transaction. Marketers aren’t looking to make friends; we are looking to make money.

If you decide to be a marketer, then the best tip I have for you is to purchase pre-owned, aged domains. These gain trust and rankings faster. Once you have a good stable of trusted, authority domains, then it’s just a matter of keeping fresh, well written content flowing.

My best advice is “don’t follow my advice” lol, because I’m not a success yet, still learning. But one thing that I can do that excels way beyond any blogger out there is images.
So here is my advice:

Don’t disregard image search. Find a great image (or make one like I do – no copyright issues) that explains your blog and give it a great image name like ‘Make-Money.jpg’ (or whatever your subject is). Now with Photoshop, add text to that image… Keywords that will show up and look good when doing an image search in Google, like “Make Money” directly onto the image, or create a white space below the image and put the text right on it. This text should be readable from as a small thumbnail size.

Images really do make a huge difference! I get just as much traffic from images as I do regular searches. It works!

My single greatest tip for succeeding online is to find something you enjoy and always stay consistent. Finding something you enjoy writing about makes it less of a chore for you to keep it updated and being consistent will bring in new readers into your community as well as keep your loyal readers coming back.

Passion is one of the greatest thing which a successful person inherited long ago in his quest for success. We all know what Passion is. Everyone has their own meaning. I personally feel Passion is the feeling which inspires to continue the quest someone is on. It is the only thing which keeps you in one piece when all hell breaks out on you.

Now Passion cannot single-handedly make you successful. You need to have the desire. You need to have the Hunger for Success. I have seen many people with lot of Passion fail. Many of the times the reason for the failure is lack of desire. Even if you have the Passion to pursue you goal you cannot achieve it until you want it very badly.

So if you really want to be successful in life or Online as a Blogger or Internet Marketer or Whatever you will need Passion to Continue and Desire of Success.

Make something people want. Too many people online are trying to be middlemen, internet marketers, quick-fix arbitragers exploiting some trick for quick gain – instead try building something of real value that people want.

Believing in yourself and keep going on when you think you have failed. I know this because I am going through this myself. Don’t get caught in the “filter”–The Filter separates you (the successful) from the rest (the failures). Don’t let failures drag you down; brush the dirt off your knees, fill yourself up with determination, and keep going. That’s how the best of the best become the best!

I am unbelievably happy with this post. I have been thinking about this for a while and so happy with the answers that were sent back to me. I hope someone enjoyed this post as much as I did.

I would love to hear your feedback on any part of this post! Even if the feedback is just telling me that I misquoted you or something Or better yet, anyone that I failed to include, do you have a great tip you would love to share? Let me know below!

This are really great tips! really great tips! from people who have experience, I will have to come over and over again to read and digest the content.
Thanks a lot.
.-= Onibalusi Bamidele´s last blog ..Google Pagerank Update 2010 is complete =-.

My Greatest tip
You have to work hard , learn a lot and most of all take action to be
successful.Also you have to be persistent and be patient in the
beginning.
.-= Dev | Technshare´s last blog ..Weekly Roundup #2 =-.

That’s way cool of you Patrick to even include me in this list with other bloggers that I admire. I like all of their tips. They are all so true. I’m happy to share what works great for me and hopefully it will help others as well. I’m also excited that I can venture to some of these other blogs that I don’t know yet and meet them as well. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.

You got it man. Your tip about the images was a great one. As you can tell I made my own image for this one. I just went with simple text, but it is still better than an unrelated picture. Thanks for being a part of this post.

Great list of some really good folks. I like how pretty much all of them relate in some way, showing there really is no “secret sauce” just different ways of consuming that sauce!
Thanks for including me, I really hope my contribution can help some bruthas (and sistas) out!
AL
.-= Allyn´s last blog ..Introduction To BackLink Stacking And Why =-.

Yeah, it is amazing who is willing to give you a little bit of help if you just ask. I honestly didn’t think I would get so many replies. I really love bloggers, they have their own community, where everyone will help each other a little bit.

Brian has a great advice, I really want to make something people want, and I agree completely with Keith completely, he has a good point, I can take some free stuff from here and there but I don’t depend on it to grow my business!
.-= Hesham @ FamousBloggers´s last blog ..What are the Elements of Successful Bloggers? =-.

Wow, this is a great resource for everybody. How you managed to get in touch with so many great online personalities and compile this list is beyond me, but I’m glad you did.

I particularly like the running theme of “persistence.” It’s so true. On good days, it’s easy to keep pushing because the income keeps your motivated; but on the bad days, it’s often hard to justify sitting in front of they keyboard for what feels like nothing. Gotta keep pushing despite good and bad.

Patrick,
Great list of quotes you got from everyone. Lots of great advice here. To me it’s all about working harder than the next guy. Everything I’ve gotten in life is because I worked harder than those around me.
.-= Mike Roosa´s last blog ..Motivated As Hell – The Review =-.

Awesome tips!, i believe all we need is identify our scope of work – the prerequisites to succeed online. Once we identify it, we dare make the first step. There is no vision without a mission – In order to succeed online we must be prepare to work day in day out to hit our target. And we can only succeed by working the right way – following the same steps successful online marketers took.
.-= harvestwages´s last blog ..Learn To Be Wisely Frugal But Selectively Extravagant! =-.